Abstract

The need to contextualize research in entrepreneurship has
become an important theme during the last decade. In
this monograph we position the increasing prominence of
“contextual entrepreneurship” research as part of a broader
scholarly wave that has previously washed across other fields.
The challenges and promises we face as this wave carries us
forward are similar in many ways to the challenges faced by
researchers in other fields. Based on a review of the current
context debate among entrepreneurship scholars and a selective
review of other disciplines, we outline and discuss issues
in theorizing, operationalising and empirically studying contexts
in entrepreneurship research. Researchers have made
rapid and substantial – though uneven – progress in contextualizing
their work. Unsurprisingly, there is healthy disagreement
over what it means to contextualize research and how
it should be done, which we see as expressions of competing
implicit theories of context. We argue that no overarching
theory of what context is or what it means is likely to be
very successful. Instead, we suggest briefly that it may be
useful to adopt and develop what we label a “critical process
approach” to contextualizing entrepreneurship research.

Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective generates new insights about why and how we might go about contextualizing entrepreneurship research. The authors attempt to frame the issues, the progress that has been made, and the substantial challenges that remain with a view toward calling for future work that takes more of what we call a critical process approach to
contextualizing entrepreneurship research.